The Global Village Myth

Distance, War, and the Limits of Power

Patrick Porter

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781626161924, 9781626161931
• eBook ISBN: 9781626161948
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

According to security elites, revolutions in information, transport, and weapons technologies have shrunk the world, leaving the United States and its allies more vulnerable than ever to violent threats like terrorism or cyberwar. As a result, they practice responses driven by fear: theories of falling dominoes, hysteria in place of sober debate, and an embrace of preemptive war to tame a chaotic world.

Patrick Porter challenges these ideas. In The Global Village Myth, he disputes globalism's claims and the outcomes that so often waste blood and treasure in the pursuit of an unattainable "total" security. Porter reexamines the notion of the endangered global village by examining Al-Qaeda's global guerilla movement, military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and drones and cyberwar, two technologies often used by globalists to support their views. His critique exposes the folly of disastrous wars and the loss of civil liberties resulting from the globalist enterprise. Showing that technology expands rather than shrinks strategic space, Porter offers an alternative outlook to lead policymakers toward more sensible responses—and a wiser, more sustainable grand strategy.

CHAPTER 1

So Near, So Far

Physical and Strategic Distance

What is distance? How is it generated? How does it function in relation to armed conflict? And how are globalists getting it wrong?

In this chapter, I argue that to understand how it shapes and constrains the exercise of power, we should appreciate the distinction between physical and strategic distance. The word “distance” comes from the Latin verb distare, to separate oneself. If we consider “distancing” as a verb, an act that separates strategically, not just “distance” as a noun, then human agency can turn spaces into what Alan Henrikson calls “distancing units.”¹ A stretch of terrain easily crossed in times of peace can become a lethal barrier in times of war. Globalists tend to conflate or confuse this important difference, mistaking the ability to move in permissive spaces with the shrinkage of the world.

To argue for the distinction between physical and strategic distance, this chapter proceeds in four parts. First, I argue that geopolitical theory at times loses sight of the differences between types of space. I then place the question of the relationship between human agency and the structure of the material world in a wider historical context, with particular reference to America. Third, I demonstrate that globalist conceptions of security are more deeply rooted than just an overestimation of technology and its compressing power. They are rooted in a liberal tradition of security thinking, a tradition that is hostile to the notion of geographical limitation. This is why globalism tends toward a view of security that is indivisible and borderless. Finally, I identify five “grounds for suspicion” that should make us think again.

Understanding Distance

Distance is generated by the interplay of terrain and technology. Space can work as a barrier, especially to the “offense” that must cross it successfully to close with its defending opponent. But other than the most imposing extremes of climate and landscape, there is no such thing as a fixed, intrinsic barrier or permanent corridor. As human agency intervenes to alter the spaces that divide polities, barriers can be expanded or contracted. Diplomats were obsessed with railways in the late nineteenth century precisely for that reason. The new locomotive transport threatened to turn buffer terrain into carrier space. Arthur Balfour believed that Afghanistan was a “non-conducting” space, an impediment to Russian adventurism that stood between it and India, but feared roads and railroads could change it. On similar grounds, Russia sought British assurances that they would not build threatening railroads in their sphere of Persia.² Demilitarized outer lands that separate the core of one country from another, and that are not actively defended, can play a “buffer” role in a more limited sense by providing warning time. But that too takes political agreement, conscious restraint, and the compliance of those caught in the middle.

An important context through which to unpack the concept of distance is the issue of water and “moats.” Water is generally more of a potential barrier than land. When applying ground forces from water onto land, it is harder and slower to cross. But its barrier power relies upon a level of resistance. The defense will benefit where it can focus its forces on land while the attacker’s forces cross only gradually and under fire. But just as humans must “man” and exploit walls for them to work, water draws its barrier power from a level of active exploitation. Undefended water and empty beaches present few obstacles to power projection, weather permitting.

Water’s properties are a central issue within debate about American security. America is flanked by oceans, and it is tempting to regard them as a natural barrier. In his seminal account of great-power politics, political scientist John Mearsheimer claims that the “stopping power of water” is a permanent obstructive force in international relations.³ The oceans, he argues, are buffers that act as a built-in check on the expansionism of would-be hegemons. Mearsheimer does not fully explain what makes water “stop.” He rightly notes that transoceanic lunges are harder to pull off than snap invasions across contiguous territories. This echoes earlier American traditions that the country’s geographical bounty afforded it “free security.” His argument implies that physical distance naturally generates the strategic payoff of a protective “moat.” But he also observes that water did not stop modern Japan’s expansion against weaker Russian and Chinese defenders, implicitly conceding that it takes more than water to do the stopping.⁴

Globalists turn this picture on its head, stressing the “enabling” power of technology, the ability to overcome maritime barriers and remake oceans into corridors of travel. But this also looks past the role of human agency in the picture and jumbles the distinct concepts of physical and strategic space. When former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said that “the idea of an ocean as protection is as obsolete as a castle moat,” or secretary of defense William Cohen that “the vast oceans have been reduced to ponds … lands across the sea are now almost as close as neighboring countries today,” they relied on a mechanical view of maritime space as mere terrain to be moved through. Similarly, one security analyst stresses that whereas Christopher Columbus’s return journeys from Spain to the Caribbean took months, today “the same journey can be made in a matter of hours for the price of an airplane ticket.”⁵ The ease of travel, he argues, physically compresses space and time in threatening ways. But this confuses the geography of a tourist or explorer with that of a military contest for the control over space. We are not dealing with space as though it were a politically uncontested thoroughfare of climate and terrain. We are considering space as the medium into which other humans intrude, space through which (and for which) violent political struggle takes place. A glance at the strategic history of the Atlantic Ocean suggests that ever since humans learned to sail and navigate, water has not derived “stopping power” or “carrying power” naturally from its physical properties. Maritime space can function as a barrier or a highway depending on the capabilities of those who would cross it, the strength of resistance, the balance between offense and defense, and the intensity of clashing wills. The Atlantic Ocean is not in itself a wide “moat.” Its expanse did not prevent the expansion of the Spanish conquistadors, whose transoceanic crossings in the sixteenth century went unresisted by their victims in Central and South America who lacked a navy to shield them. For Viking amphibious raiders, unopposed at sea, water afforded the luxury to choose where and when to strike. The monasteries that they preyed on did not draw stopping power from the seas. Bodies of water in themselves do not obstruct as moats if there is an insufficient defense able to thwart attackers with sufficient capability to cross them. To mistake particular trends in a certain period for a geopolitical law is to overlook the impact of agency and resistance on bodies of water.

For the United States, water has functioned as both barrier and carrier. Entering World War I in 1917–18, America transported vast quantities of men and materiel across the Atlantic to deploy on the Western Front, unmolested except for a faltering U-boat campaign, thanks to Britain’s Royal Navy bottling up Germany’s High Seas Fleet. But against the Axis of 1941–45, crossing and securing the Atlantic shipping lanes against effective armed resistance took a colossal maritime struggle in the Battle of the Atlantic, from Washington’s undeclared war in 1941 to the crescendo of the campaign in mid-1943. The United States had to fight its way in through an Atlantic stalked by U-boat wolf packs that threatened to cut Britain’s maritime throat and starve it into submission. Transporting armies to Britain as a base for continental war in Europe, and supplying that base, was a high-risk proposition until the Allies had secured the sea lanes. America and Britain secured a bridgehead to northwest Africa for Operation Torch in 1943. But this was only after the Allies had tilted the Atlantic balance in their favor. Even then, to avoid Axis interception it took elaborate deception, and the penalties of error or bad luck for the invasion fleet could have been heavy.⁶

One step in America’s rise to the position of global hegemon was its ability to overturn the naval “stopping power” of its rivals. As a semi-insular power with no major rivals at home, it had regional dominance that meant that it could focus its might on applying its power beyond its neighborhood, unlike continental European and Asian powers who were occupied dealing with their neighbors.⁷ This achievement gave Washington what Barry Posen calls “command of the commons,” the sea, air, and space domains that it can defend and threaten to deny to others.⁸ As the naval supremo, it turned the oceans into a global protectorate under its sway. Geopolitically, distance yielded advantages and disadvantages. If America operated from a remove, it had the ability to withdraw. During the Cold War, the fact that America was asserting itself from a different hemisphere and could “go home” threatened the credibility of its alliance commitments and its extended nuclear deterrence toward other states. At the same time, by operating from a remove, America’s insularity made it seem less dangerous and less permanent, and therefore more attractive as a balancing ally, compared to local threats that had nowhere to retreat to.⁹

As this arrangement requires a considerable level of relative power in America’s favor, there is no guarantee that it will last forever. America’s ability to project power at will is subject to change, and changing balances of power could revive one of its oldest fears, the fear of eviction. If the world becomes more multipolar in the distribution of power as other states rise, those states could flex their maritime muscles and we enter a new era of sea denial. Parts of the “commons” could become “contested zones” where others could find and sink American ships and threaten its bases, to the point where even the United States would find it hard to dominate affordably.¹⁰ The strategic “size” of the maritime East Asia, for example, will continue to vary, as a product of interaction between space, material capability, and political will.

So distance in human conflict is not intrinsic to space but a product of human exploitation of it. The ever-shifting relationship between technology, terrain, and agency means that spatial barriers rarely correspond exactly to their physical size. Some relatively short physical spaces represent more of a barrier than some larger ones. Defending states can construct defenses over relatively narrow bodies of water that are more formidable than larger land barriers. It proved easier for Hitler’s Germany to overrun continental Europe than prevail across the Channel in the Battle of Britain. The small state of modern Israel is traditionally anxious about a lack of strategic depth and the scarcity of time and space, fears accentuated by memory of the shock of the 1973 surprise attack and successive wars of survival. Its strategists feared that modern technology made geography an irrelevance to Israel’s survival, putting Israel’s airfields and any target within its narrow coastal strip within range of the aircraft and missiles of its Arab neighbors.¹¹ Israel now restretches that space with its defense missile system, Iron Dome, a relatively cheap and accurate fortification that effectively pushes its adversaries farther back.

It could be objected that the ultimate destructive technologies and their delivery systems place us in a precarious “village.” The physical act of applying force from afar and putting a bomb on target has in many ways obviously accelerated, through drones, aircraft, or long-range missiles. A nuclear missile fired across the world can almost instantly destroy a city and its population regardless of geographic barriers. With enough nukes, states can penetrate missile shields sufficiently to inflict catastrophic damage. It only takes a few minutes for a long-range strategic weapon to reach its target, though most states lack the capability to fire an intercontinental missile and lack the deliverable bombs.

But a narrowly technical view of war as a matter of the range and velocity of weapons or the delivery of projectiles over space fails to consider the central political problem. This is the ability of those wielding force to translate it into political opportunity at affordable cost, which is the essence of strategy. War as a political act is rarely a matter of merely applying brute force on a target with the objective of annihilation, regardless of consequences. Warring parties mostly do not opt for a pure brute force objective (annihilating an adversary) as opposed to a more limited objective of coercion (changing the adversary’s behavior, ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Strife in the Village
• Chapter 1 So Near, So Far: Physical and Strategic Distance
• Chapter 2 Wars for the World: The Rise of Globalism: 1941, 1950, 2001
• Chapter 3 Lost in Space: Al Qaeda and the Limits of Netwar
• Chapter 4 Access Denied: Technology, Terrain, and the Barriers to Conquest
• Chapter 5 Wide of the Mark: Drones, Cyber, and the Tyrannies of Distance
• Conclusion: The Geopolitics of Hubris
• Index